Other Arch Flavors I've tried (some are no longer with us) include:
- ArchBang
- EndeavourOS
- Manjaro
- Chakra
So with that out of the way, I've found my Garuda experience incredibly painful. From messy repositories (Chaotic-AUR plus their own stuff), to an overly involved upgrade process (when using the helper) - the distro screams of a team that has no freakin' clue how to maintain an actual distribution.
It's basically Arch on hard mode with so many settings rolled into their own packages which need to be removed before customization.
Then we get to the purported performance enhancements and, honestly, this is the worst performing distro I've ever used, by multiple miles. I'm not sure if its the scheduler settings, or something with the zram settings - but this distro hitches and hangs constantly. (5950x, 64GB of Ram, Samsung 980 Pro drives, NVIDIA RTX 3080Ti - NOT a weak machine by any standards)
I'd normally chalk it up to compositor issues on Wayland (yes, I prefer Wayland and it works fine for most Arch derivitaves even with Nvidia). However the performance issues even crop up on basic terminal commands on a TTY with lots of weird hangs and lags.
The ONLY thing that was easier on this distro was installing the various Proton GE builds and other specialty stuff found in the Chaotic-AUR. But given the above, it's definitely not worth it when one can configure an Arch box to do the same things without all of the problems.
Perhaps I'm not doing something right? Given all the praise for this distro, perhaps it shouldn't perform like this?
To be completely and utterly clear - I'm an advanced user trying out these distros for fun and discovery. I can indeed "just use a different distro" but wanted to give this one a fair shake before moving on.
I use cachyos. I mainly treat it like an easy arch installer, it has calamares, allowing me to install LUKS encrypted BTRFS, with subvolumes that are compatible with timeshift without too much hassle, tinkering, or babying.
The first thing I do after installing is rip out many of the special changes cachyos makes. The theme makes some apps unreadable. Fish as a default shell is a really questionable choice (like I get zsh, but fish isn't compatible with bash). I prefer bash so I switch back to that. The cpu limiter, ananicy-cpp, is generally annoying and I would rather not have it. I stopped using it when I was gaming (not anymore), and I realized that you have to manually add exceptions for games that weren't in a default list consisting of mostly popular games, like the few games I used to play.
But the other performance changes are great. It has a custom repo compiled with x86_v3 extensions, which are proven to lead to a performance increase. Zram instead of zswap is a pretty powerful choice. The custom kernel (and linux-zen, which I use)* have an option enabled that enables the use of this software, called uksmd. A complex name, but it's basically a ram deduper, and it's very powerful. Right now, with only 9 firefox tabs and a terminal window open, I'm saving 350 mb of ram. With a LOT of browser tabs open, I've been able to save 1.5 GB before. Obviously, this comes at the cost of cpu, but I haven't really noticed change to performance/battery life with it on.
Overall, it's a very good, innovative distro (haven't found uksmd anywhere else), with some questionable aesthetic decisions.
*the linux-zen is optimized for desktop use, linux-cachyos is optimized for gaming. I haven't felt a difference, but right tool for the job I guess.